Game Reviews

Burning Tires 3D

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Burning Tires 3D

Come dinnertime, some of us like to keep our foods separate. Meat, potatoes, and vegetable hold their own territory on the plate. You might be okay mixing peas into your mashed potatoes, but slicing up steak and making those fluffy potatoes chunky is a bit odd.

Burning Tires 3D is the meat in a racing mash of arcade and simulation styles. Quite which sub-genre it aims to fit itself into is a little hard to tell. Not that a game is obliged to make a black-and-white distinction about its gameplay style, but in this case mixing realism with cute fantasy doesn’t work.

The game's exaggerated vehicles and cartoon-like venues, ranging from volcanic landscapes and snow-covered courses, invoke a sense of whimsy. You would naturally expect equally outrageous driving mechanics to accompany this post-nuclear clown sense of style; instead, Burning Tires 3D operates under more demanding physics.

Control varies from ultra-simple (no braking required) to frustratingly haphazard. Crossing into the verge causes the physics engine to actively pull you off the road, which feels completely inappropriate considering the mostly flat tracks.

Hitting a rock or barrier alongside the track bounces you directly to the other side of the road, which is narrow enough that you have no time to take control before you’re bounced right back again.

You’re offered two systems of control: touch and tilt. Neither is ideal, both suffering from a lack of precision. Rather than working as an analogue system (perhaps sliding the finger across the screen from side to side), the touchscreen option simply adds a digital control to either edge of the screen.

This essentially puts the game on rails and with a modicum of attention winning becomes a simple matter of patience.

The accelerometer does, fortunately, offer a sensitivity adjustment through an options menus and if you take the time to tweak it to your hand it’ll mostly serve its purpose and get you through the narrow tracks - though not without a lot of coasting from wall to wall.

Take, for example, a straight stretch of road. Hitting the verge results in the car being bounced back and forth along the length of the stretch until it hits a turn.

Instead of righting itself, the car ends up pulling a u-turn - something which is infuriating difficult to perform manually to get you back on track. Unless you’re already way out in front, once this nonsense begins you can pretty much write that level off and start the tournament again.

Even if the driving mechanics were spot-on, Burning Tires 3D would still have to address its assortment of lacklustre tracks. The attempt at whimsy feels more like an excuse for featureless scenery rather than a concept tied to the game’s premise.

Turns are pretty much uniform, requiring little in the way of skill to navigate, and elevation changes could hardly be called extreme.

As harsh as all this sounds, we feel strongly that there’s a fun and very affordable little racing game hidden deep within Burning Tires 3D, desperately trying to break out. You get a taste of it when the amusing car effigies begin elbowing for room on the overly-constricted tracks.

A taste, however, is not what you're after when you sit down to dinner and want something meaty.

Burning Tires 3D

Uninspiring level designs and unadventurous gameplay conspire to spoil the few moments of fun this game tries to pack in
Score
Spanner Spencer
Spanner Spencer
Yes. Spanner's his real name, and he's already heard that joke you just thought of. Although Spanner's not very good, he's quite fast, and that seems to be enough to keep him in a regular supply of free games and away from the depressing world of real work.